State Rep Ousted for Sexual Misconduct
Based on Unsubstantiated Staffer Claims
General Investigating Committee Report
Capitol Inside
May 9, 2023
The Texas House voted on Tuesday to throw one of its own members out for the first time in nearly a century despite the fact that he'd resigned the day before in an apparent attempt to keep from being expelled by colleagues as a consequence of a sexual encounter with a 19-year-old aide on his staff.
The House gave Republican Bryan Slaton the formal boot with a vote of 147-0 for House Resolution 1542. GOP Speaker Dade Phelan, who came off the sidelines with vote for the resolution, defended the dramatic action before he ordered House officials to have Slaton's name scrubbed from the scoreboards at the front of the chamber and the name plate on his now-empty desk on the floor.
Slaton's expulsion with unanimous approval represented the first significant fruit from a fight against sexual harassment that began in the Texas House at the outset of the #MeToo movement in the midst of revelations on movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's treatment of women in Hollywood. A General Investigating Committee report that recommended Slaton's ouster acknowledged in a 16-page report that it began the probe with a focus on revisions to House rules that were products of a Workgroup on House Sexual Harassment Policy that Republican Joe Straus appointed in 2017 as the speaker at the time.
The House panel sought to crucify Slaton by puffing up the report with accusations that ranged from official abuse of power, oppression, disordely conduct, gross conduct and other imaginative claims. But the crime of passion with which Slaton was charged had been committed by lawmakers at the Texas Capitol since the Legislature's inception. But Slaton violated the sexual harassment policy that the House had added to its rules in recent years based on workgroup recommendations - and that's what brought him down.
The committee report painted a narrative in which Slaton had intercourse with a woman who was old enough to have sex but not to purchase alcohol. House investigators determined that the live interest on Slaton's staff was too inebriated from drinks that he served her to know whether she was having consensual sex as an adult or being raped. But the report establishes a flirtacious relationship that had blossomed between the former representative and the staffer who told a pair of co-accusers that she was in love with him and ignored their pleas for her not to go to bed with her boss.
The staffer "could not effectively consent to intercourse and could not indicate whether it was welcome or unwelcome," the report declares. "In the absence of any testimony by Slaton that (the aide) indicated that sexual conduct was welcome, we believe it is reasonable to draw the adverse inference that it was unwelcome."
The House sent two clear messages today to its members with the Slaton expulsion vote. First and foremost, it won't hesitate to remove members who have sex with employees on their own staffs. The House vote also effectively deemed that sexual intercourse with aides on other lawmakers' staffs may be wrong if the aides are under 21 and the alleged aggressor has alienated at least two-thirds of colleagues and hasn't shown remorse. But House members having sex with other representatives' staffers is acceptable if the aides have reached the legal drinking age.
The final nail in Slaton's coffin came when he declined to admit that he'd erred. GOP State Rep. Andrew Murr of Junction - the sponsor of HR 1542 as the investigative panel chairman - noted that Slaton had expressed no remorse or apology in the resignation letter that he tendered on Monday. But Murr said he'd wept and cried over the Slaton case nonetheless.
Murr and the committee's other members said nothing before the vote today on the fact that the Slaton lovemaking partner had refused to confirm or to deny claims about her sex life to investigators including the unsubstantiated assertions that she'd been a virgin before going to bed with Slaton and that the two left the sheets soaked with blood in their wake.
Slaton was held to a drastically different standard than Texas lawmakers have been in the past. None of the representatives who teamed up to expel Slaton showed any signs of comprehending the can of worms that they unleashed today when they disenfranchised the voters in the district that he represented with a vote to expel someone for a House rules infraction and minor misdemeanor offenses at best based on hearsay, innuendo and inconsistent statements from three aides who never really got their stories straight.
more to come .... |
